[FRIAM] The metaphor in the room

[glen]

This seems like a fantastic attempt! It's still layered with sophistry. You're saying I've stripped you of the capacity or interest. Yet that's clearly not true. You're reifying a thought experiment, a counterfactual. That's fine.

The attempt to look at the world naively is a good one, though, even if what you're looking at is the *presentation* of my meaning ("anger", "contempt", "rage", troll metaphor, etc.). It's good to strip away layers of the narrative like that to see if you can view something naively, "objectively". But it's still an analysis of the presentation, not the target of the arrangement of lenses and mirrors I tried to assemble.

IDK. I've done all I can, I think. My intent was to circumscribe and directly target why Schmulik would/will eventually ghost you: because you look at his metaphor instead of through it.

I'd like to leave off congratulating you on the attempt in the hopes that you'll do it again later, in some other context, but without adding the pedantic counterfactual. Just for grins, I'll add that a medium dose of psychedelics, in the proper set & setting of course, can help doff one's debilitating obsessions. And I recommend shrooms. You can buy the spores on the internet. They're legal pretty much anywhere. And grow them in your closet. Doing so adds a little connection to nature and the plant to help layer the trip. Cleanse your doors of perception! 8^D


On 3/20/26 11:21 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> Ok, Glen,  You win.  You have stripped from me any capacity or interest in how metaphors mean, the limits of what they do and don't convey.  I am in that state.  Now, without reference or exploration of any metaphor, please help me understand what you meant by the following passage:
> 
> */But if you actually want to *understand* what some other agent is trying to say, you read *through* their text. You use it as a lens. If, every time you picked up your eyeglasses, you only looked *at* the lenses, those glasses would be useless as a tool. Every time you meet a missive focusing on the metaphors used, you are explicitly/purposefully misunderstanding the author. If metaphors are a tool, you're ignoring their tool-ness. You promote the means/tool to an end. [⛧] /*
> 
> 
> It's funny, because before you stripped me of my ability to think about metaphors, I thought I understood you precisely.  You want me to take life just as it presents itself.   Ok.  I can do that, sort of. It's what I do most of the time. As we both know, there is nothing simple about how the world presents itself.  There is always a past and a future and the naive present is always an amalgam of the two.  We live neither in nor for the moment.  But I will hum along.   What do I see in this case?  Well, first I naively see anger and contempt.  I could try to mitigate that experience, by examining the text, but no, I am not permitted to do that in this world of naive perception.  What I see, is a man incoherent with ... rage?   What I see is a creature lurking in the dark moist crevaces  under a bridge shouting, "Who's  that treading over my bridge?" Thats what I naively see.  But none of that is helpful to me in trying to reap the benefit of your prodigious mind.  So I try to 
> NOT take what I see naively to be all that is there to be seen.  I say to myself, this is a man who has given me some really great working metaphors.  This is a man whose thought is respected widely by people whose thought I respect.  Before he stripped my of my analytical powers, I was led to try and squeeze every bit of juice out of the dry- skinned fruit he grumpily proffered.  Now, I just see an angry man living in an incoherent world.
> 
> Please, please Glen give me back my powers of analysis so I can see you as I used to see you.
> 
> N
> 
> On Fri, Mare 20, 2026 at 7:28 AM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Fools have more to say, and more impact, than, for example, nit-picking grammar nazis.
> 
>     Anyway, here is the counterargument, AGAIN! OK. I grant you all 5 of your points. As a fan of postmodernist approaches, the examination of every layer of every narrative in the stack *can* be worthwhile and interesting, especially for academics. I'm glad you are also a postmodernist.
> 
>     But if you actually want to *understand* what some other agent is trying to say, you read *through* their text. You use it as a lens. If, every time you picked up your eyeglasses, you only looked *at* the lenses, those glasses would be useless as a tool. Every time you meet a missive focusing on the metaphors used, you are explicitly/purposefully misunderstanding the author. If metaphors are a tool, you're ignoring their tool-ness. You promote the means/tool to an end. [⛧]
> 
>     People use their deeply embedded metaphors to communicate. If all you can do is yap about their metaphors, you are blocking their ability to communicate and your ability to understand what they mean.
> 
>     I'll turn your moral back around on you. You can choose to ignore my counter argument, yet again. Or you can tell me why it's more important to look at the lens than through the lens. [⛤]
> 
> 
>     [⛧] A good analogy, here, is that of paraphilia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphilia>>. You have a fetish. Rather than a metaphor *enhancing* your ability to see the world, you've fetishized them. You think the metaphor *is* the world. Like a fetishist, you're aroused by the tool, not the objective.
> 
>     [⛤] I can shunt a counter-counter argument in advance. In a mostly rhetorical world, if you merely look *through* the metaphor, you're at risk of being a victim of purposefully designed narratives, intended to exploit or mislead you. Therefore, a critical thinker must *also* look at the lenses, not merely through them. But this argument fails because if you can't even look through the lens in the first place, then you can never critically analyze how it [mis]directs your gaze. So the *first* and primary skill is to be able to look *through* metaphors. Looking at them is a secondary skill. And, like the grammar nazis, a fetish for the form preemptively excludes an understanding of the function.
> 
>     On 3/19/26 1:10 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>      > 1. Metaphors are everywhere.  We can disclaim them all we like, but they are deeply embedded in the way in which we proceed from thought to thought.  They lurk in how professionals talk to one another and also in the manner in which professionals talk to the public.
>      > 2. There is a lot of evidence these days that scientists have "lost" the public.  This is a very dangerous situation. My suspicion is that this has to do with the metaphors we use when we talk to the public about what we do.
>      > 3.  We all seem to agree that there is truth and falsehood disguised in every metaphor.
>      > 4. Given the ambiguity of metaphors, I am interested in a method for understanding their role  in thought and communication, particularly in understanding the manner in which truth and falsehood is deployed in them.  How are we to distinguish between a better and a worse metaphor if all contain elements of falsehood. What am I to take from your metaphor?  What are you to take from mine?
>      > 5. Given the entanglement of truth and falsehood in metaphor, it's worth exploring distinctions between what implications a speaker intends by a metaphor, what the coherence of the metaphor can logically sustain by way of implication, and what implications hearers take from the metaphor.
>     -- 


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